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Social Proof – Jesus Fish & PhD

Posted by, Marc Theiler on August 8, 2017

Greetings my fair weathered friends,

What will you spend your life currency on today? You are only given so much currency per day – you cannot mount two horses or string two bows at the same time, you cannot be HERE and there at the same time, where ever your attention flows, there you are… Shall we begin?

Social Proof, Part II – a continued expansion on an introductory post from yesterday.

Social Proof is a fundamental, mental short-cut – that allows the human enterprise to make a speed-of-light, snap assumption. Real-time, reality as we know it, unfolds a holistic, rich, robust context at the speed of light – reality bombards the human bio-brain with incredible amounts of “data flow”, incredible amounts of data…….of context……..of things wiggling and happening. The human bio-brain just like your computer can only take-in and “make sense” of a tiny fraction of this robust, ever-moving context. Our human biological evolution cannot remotely keep pace with our ever, accelerating technological evolution. In order for the bio-brain to “make sense”, it must sacrifice whole-context (meta-context) for still frames of selective reference. Our bio-brains MUST “freeze”, must SELECT bits and pieces of context in order to make quick life or death decisions at the speed of light. You can imagine this dynamic as our “firmware”, the operating system before our real-OS – the code “layered underneath” the conscious-code. You can think of this as our Reptilian-partition, the quick-linear-rational regard.

Our Reptilian-partition of the bio-brain evolved to help the human enterprise survive within a fast-paced, dangerous marketplace. IT is part and parcel of who we are, we cannot operate, let alone survive within our material plain without its assistance. It is necessary, yet we’ve been moving farther and farther away from IT. You can imagine our Reptilian system as our NATURAL-connection, our BASIC connective-relationship with RATION – which is to SEPARATE, which is to DISCRIMINATE. We humans couldn’t navigate if we couldn’t SEPARATE foreground from background, left from right, North from South – in order to navigate, we must separate…..no other way around it. It is HERE were we forge our SELECTIVITY HEURISTIC, our mental-short-cut. Since we humans do not have the luxury of entertaining meta-context “all at once”, at the speed of light – we can only entertain tiny fragments of it, we therefore cherry-pick the attributes and elements that are familiar or supportive to our overall “Reptilian” objective, which is to survive and procreate. Human beings then convince themselves so thoroughly that these selections are REALITY, when in reality they have filled-in huge amounts of context with assumption, with illusion.

We SEPARATE so that we may NAVIGATE. The backbone of SOCIAL PROOF rests within one of THE MOST FUNDAMENTAL PILLARS of our human condition – which is…….CONSISTENCY. Commitment & Consistency is one of the fundamental building blocks of all human interaction. We humans base our movements on expectations – we size up THREATS AND OPPORTUNITIES at the speed of light – anything un-expected is threatening to us…….and if we cannot predict future behavior, we get anxious – we build terrifying nightmares of skies, always falling.

Your bio-brain SEPARATES context at the speed of light – your bio-brain puts people and objects into their associative-category well-before your conscious regard even notices. You will like and dislike complete strangers simply because they display similar attributes of a person you’ve already interacted with and placed into its convenient polarity (friend/foe, reward/punishment, threat/opportunity, like/dislike). And if you are not conscious of this NATURAL FUNDAMENTAL, you will continue to “size up” good people without a hint of real-conscious consideration – you will judge these people without the luxury of significant-experience, you will execute upon these folks with mere reactive-assumption. You will DRAFT A NARRATIVE about these people LONG AFTER your Reptilian-partition has already supplied the psychic-system with its “feeling”, its feeling of like/dislike, friend/foe, threat/opportunity. You warp reality to make your own self…..comfortably certain about the current circumstance. You will naturally give deference to those human enterprises that have something to offer you – FOOD, CONSUMABLES, SEX – and you will naturally DISLIKE those enterprises that are perceived to have an ability to TAKE SOMETHING AWAY FROM YOU. The entire point of this dynamic is to cultivate comfortable, certainty within the bio-brain – insothat IT may focus on new, more innovative THREATS/OPPORTUNITIES.

This is NATURAL, this is our ground zero – the basic nature of mankind…….YET, as we evolve….we move further and further way from our NATURAL tendencies and closer towards an Un-Natural state of affairs, our neo-cortext is our introduction to artificial intelligence, it is here where we obtain the luxury of PROJECTION, abstraction…..the potential for non-local considerations.

Social Proof allows the bio-brain to short-cut its way to comfortable certainty – to allow the enterprise to place its BET, “will this person kill or exile me?” or “what does this person have for me, what can I get from this person?”

Social Proof attempts to convince in the same way SYMBOLS AND ARCHETYPES impress – yet social proof is ENTIRELY MAKE-BELIEVE whereas SYMBOLS serve as root-notions upon which all other clever metaphors are predicted upon. Symbols are eternal and impeccable – Social Proof is insecure, fleeting and false.

If Tim Ferris had me on his podcast talking about these things, the audience would be highly skeptical of a person speaking with authority on such matters without the obvious-luxury of a MIT, YALE, STANFORD, HARVARD degree or without a PhD after my name. Since I have not written a best-selling book or been on TV and since I do not have a mob of fan-boys or any sort of audience to vouch for my authenticity – good, reasonable folks are not likely to “listen” to what I have to say. People have come to utilize social proof so thoroughly that they pay no mind to the context and content. Clever people, intelligent people are quite good at fooling the flock to receive rewards – they don social proof as a short-cut to providing REAL VALUE, they will use social-proof like a magician uses slight-of-hand to fool the audience into complying with their setup-illusion.

In order to distinguish FAKENEWS from what is ACTUAL – you must be able to account for and combat any and all of these natural short-cut mechanisms, otherwise you’ll ONLY entertain what your Reptilian partition (your insecure, Unconscious) wants to entertain, which is to appease a carnal, natural desire – to allocate, to dominate, to separate, to metabolise. You will selectively judge your fellow man, you will stop SEEING your fellow man, you will EXECUTE your comfortable certainty without the luxury of substantial experience…….upon your fellow man.

This is it for now, there’s so much more for the initiate to realize…….perhaps we can expand further in due time.